Description:
Unlike bacteria and viruses, which are based on DNA and RNA, prions are unique as disease-causing agents since they are misfolded proteins. Prion diseases are called "protein structural conformational diseases. This monograph is the book on molecular dynamics (MD) simulations nearly for all the known normal prion protein (PrPC) PDB entries in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and associations. Pig is a species that is largely resistant to prions, and chicken, turtles, frogs are species resisting prion infection too firstly, this book will address all PrP strong immunity species (such as rabbits, dogs, horses, water buffaloes, pigs, chicken, turtles, frogs), compared with high susceptibility species. Other PrP models and doppel models are also MD studied in this book. Secondly, all the mutants of mouse PrP and human PrP are well studied by this book. Mouse mutations in the 2-2 loop and the C-terminal will bring clear structures with highly and clearly ordered loop structures. Human mutations will cause prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases (CJDs), Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker (GSS) syndrome, fatal familial insomnia (FFI), etc. Deep MD analyses of mouse and human mutants are done in this book. Thirdly, PrP binding with antibodies/compounds etc. is well MD studied in this book. The informatics of potential antiprion drugs known will be revealed. Lastly, cross- structure PrP peptides are well studied. This book is ideal for practical computing staff in the fields of computational physics, computational biology, computational chemistry, biomedicine, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, materials, applied mathematics and theoretical physics, information technology, operations research, biostatistics, etc. As an accessible introduction to these fields, this book is also ideal as a teaching material for students.
Description:
This monograph is the first easy-to-read-and-understand book on prion proteins' molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and on prions' molecular modelling (MM) constructions. It enables researchers to see what is crucial to the conformational change from normal cellular prion protein (PrPC) to diseased infectious prions (PrPSc), using MD and MM techniques. As we all know, prion diseases, caused by the body's own proteins, are invariably fatal and highly infectious neurodegenerative diseases effecting humans and almost all animals for a major public health concern. Prion contains no nucleic acids and it is a misshapen or conformation-changed protein that acts like an infectious agent; thus prion diseases are called “protein structural conformational” diseases. PrPC is predominant in